Author's Response

I very much appreciate the discussants' contributions. In one form or another they hinted that there is a marked difference between “healthy” reactions and psychopathology. At times the borderline is not clear-cut, especially when the young persons are asked to adjust to cultural pathology. The emphasis of my paper is upon intrapsychic processes, but it was necessary to include some remarks about mass psychology and the existing environmental and social forces, even though my expertise is greatest in the first-mentioned.

As to the question of regression versus progression, I am more than willing to concede that it may be necessary first to regress before we can make the big leap forward. This should not in any way refute the observation that much of the behavior of the young people (which I only partially described in the paper) was in fact regressive. This is neither an insult nor a manifestation of “countertransference,” as Dr. Esman suggests, but is as near as I could possibly get to a dispassionate observation. Furthermore, it cannot be said that the students who displayed the reactions I described were merely a few isolated neurotic individuals. Hundreds of thousands of students and nonstudents were involved, not all to the same extent, to be sure, but enough to discern distinct behavioral patterns.

Although they came from backgrounds of varying stability and values, the youth showed sufficient concordance of feelings and attitudes as to constitute “a movement.” A lynching could be considered a social action when there is some agreement

among the participants as a group, although it would be abhorrent as an individual performance. The individual superego can be superseded by the less responsible superego of the mob. We also speak of nations as having personality characteristics, such as German paranoia or Hungarian sadomasochism. Obviously not every German is paranoid, nor every Hungarian a sado-masochist. Social psychology takes into consideration historic ev